Failing himself utterly, he fell to watching Connie's face for some token of the hopelessness of his passion, telling himself that he should find strength to stay away when he should read his sentence in the calm gray eyes. But Connie's eyes were as yet no more than frankly sympathetic. And because he was far from home, and seemingly friendless, and fighting the last grim battle with an incurable malady, she made him welcome and yet more welcome, until finally, the optimistic insanity of the consumptive came upon him, assuring him that he should live and not die, and pointing him hopefully down a dim vista of years,--a shining way wherein they two might walk hand in hand till they should come to the gate of the House Beautiful whose chatelaine is Fame. CHAPTER XVI THE line of retreat from the valley, called by Jeffard "of dry bones," to the possible land of promise in the Mosquito, lay through Leadville; not the teeming, ebullient, pandemoniac mining-camp of the early carbonate era, but its less crowded, less effervescent, though no less strenuous successor of the present. On the march across the sky-pitched mountains it had been agreed between them that there should be one bivouac in the city of the bleak altitudes. That is to say, Garvin proposed it, and Jeffard assented, though not without a premonition that the halt would be fatal to the proposed Mosquito sequel to the campaign in the Saguache. He knew at least one of Garvin's weaknesses, and that it was akin to his own. There were the beast of burden and the dispensable moiety of the camping outfit to sell, and provision to buy; and Jeffard weighed his companion in the balances of his own shortcomings. He was well assured that he could not trust himself with money in his hand in any such city of chanceful opportunity as the great carbonate camp; and arraigning Garvin at the bar of the same tribunal, he judged him before the fact. It was a measure of the apathetic indifference which possessed Jeffard that the premonition gave him scant concern. He marveled inwardly when the fact of indifference defined itself. Aside from any promptings of common human gratitude evolving themselves into friendly solicitude for the man who had twice saved his life,--promptings which he found dead because he looked to find them dead,--there was this: If his companion should stumble and spill the scanty residue in the common purse the wolf-pack of famine and distress would be at their heels in a single sweep of the clock-hands. And yet the fact remained.